Meredith Monk inhabits the Guggenheim with an assist from the Montclair State University Chorale

Meredith Monk and a select group of dancers perform the finale of Monk's "Ascension Variations" at the Guggenheim Museum.

NEW YORK -- In the magical world of performance artist Meredith Monk, time seems to bow until the future curves around to touch the distant past.

The artist, a veteran of the 1960s avant-garde, took possession of the Guggenheim Museum Thursday with more than 100 singers, dancers and musicians to present her "Ascension Variations." Adapted to the curving Guggenheim space, this inspirational spectacle based on a work called "Songs of Ascension" has been touring America since its preview in Minneapolis last summer.

Liberating viewers from convention, "Ascension Variations" points the way forward with a fresh approach to the theatrical experience. Monk expands our field of vision by placing the audience on the floor of the museum's grand rotunda, obliging us to scan the spacious surroundings. The performers appear and disappear on the tiered galleries that spiral up around the museum's central core.

Monk buys into the ancient notion that art has a sacred power to transform. Through wordless vocalizing -- breathy syllables repeated in snatches of melody -- and through the resonance of silent gestures, she aims to awaken spiritual yearnings hidden beneath the accretions of modern civilization. In "Ascension Variations," the Guggenheim's atrium becomes a stand-in for womb-like caverns of prehistory.

As the audience fills the space, Monk introduces the aural juxtapositions that will define her score. The murmuring of the Montclair State University Chorale and the Stonewall Chorale fade in and out, permeating the air like a vapor. In contrast, a disorderly clatter and rustle of percussion instruments seem to come from different directions. Hooting voices suggest bird cries and animal grunts.

In this artificial forest, a dancer begins to spin, her arms raised like rotary blades. Some performers wear historical costume. Marie Antoinette appears on one level, Cleopatra above her. Monk's protagonists, however, are a timeless tribe of hikers, their clothing and skin dyed bright vermilion.

Borrowed from the 1969 performance piece "Juice," on which "Ascension Variations" is based, the "red people" trudge up the gallery ramps, pausing to look around apprehensively. They will reappear at way stations in spot-lit tableaux, and when they reach the top one of the women will break into exultant song.

As we follow their upward trek, we see the bowing elbows of a string ensemble protruding over a balcony. Individual singers and musicians drift by in profile, and chorus members reach over the balconies in single file to scoop the air.

In the second of three segments, the audience climbs to the top of the museum, observing at close range performers who occupy niches and who pool in backwaters. Gradually onlookers and performers merge.

Then, reversing our initial orientation, Monk and a select group of dancers reappear on the ground floor, drawing the audience to the edges of the balconies to look down at them. The naturalness with which the meandering crowd spontaneously creates order is a neat trick, reinforcing Monk's premise that some impulses -- like the desire to ascend -- are innate.

Tapping into the wellspring of human emotions, Monk has produced an experience that is profoundly, inexplicably satisfying. "Songs of Ascension" brings so many opposites together that the experience seems to be everything at once -- intimate and communal, spiritual and prosaic, innocent and wise.